Motivation

The Problem

I am sure I am not the only one to have struggles with motivation. One of my goals is to write at least one blog post a week, but some weeks getting enough motivation to do the required prep work and then write the post is hard. Some weeks personal things come up, other weeks medical, some weeks work is more challenging than normal. The list could go on and on as you all well know.

The Present

Take this week for example I had an idea in mind for a post and worked on a project to test the idea out for most of the week without any success. As the week passed and I was no closer to finishing the project my motivation levels dropped rapidly. I found myself more interested in reading How To Win Friends and Influence People for the second time than working on the post for this week.

Life will always throw us curve balls and plans will need to be adjusted. It feels like life has been nothing but curve balls over the last few months which has drained my inventory of posts. The last few weeks every weekend I am in a mad rush to get a sample done and get the associated write up finished before publish time. The stress of this rush every week has added to my decline in motivation.

Some Help

The question is how to prevent and/or get past a lack of motivation. I was catching up on some of John Sonmez’s YouTube videos when I came across The Secret Sauce For Continuous Motivation in which John addresses the issue keeping motivation levels up. The gist of the video is to always have a something that you are making progress on. I think John is on to something with this line of thinking. Without making progress on some front it is much easyer for negative emotions to pile up and make it feel like progress is impossible. If I had another project I could switch to that I know I can make progress on it would have provided some relief after hitting a wall.

The Future

In order to address this I am going to come up with a better plan with time boxes on how long I can spend on a particular project. This will allow me to switch to more productive projects if I hit a wall. I am hoping the time boxes will also remove some of the negative emotions associated with having to drop a project. Dropping a project will move from being a failure to being part of the plan while leaving the option to come back to the project at a later date.

In order jump start my progress I am going to go back and revisit some of the basic introductory topics I have covered in the past. Those have been some of my most popular posts and now that ASP.NET Core has released and Aurelia and Angular 2 are at the RC stages I feel there is value in revisiting those basic topics.

Some Encouragement

I am going to leave you with this video from John Sonmez that I found encouraging. You may find it corny or something, but John has personally replied to some emails and I know he does that for thousands of people. Without his book and blogging course I would have never started this blog. It is nice to know that there are people out there who are willing to spend their time to help and support others. Where do you go when you are needing some support?